Bottles vs Kegs

[bmd2k1]

Show of hands what ur preferred storage/serving method is....AND any tips u might have [emoji3]

Plus some perspective on quantities/timeframes would sure help.

 

[Smellyglove]

This question is so much more than the question asks. Some beers = only keg, other beers only bottles, and some might be from keg to bottle.

 

[bmd2k1]

Ya mean ciders [emoji15]

 

[bmd2k1]

Yep..that was my goal...to understand what peeps are doing....and why? Learning process

 

[Smellyglove]

Sorry. Didn't notice this was in the cider-subforum.

 

[MaxStout]

Everything I brew--beer, wine, cider--I bottle. I don't go through it fast enough to warrant kegging.

 

[ddibbern5]

I’ve only kegged my cider. It’s my understanding that you can’t back sweeten cider if you bottle ferment..? Or at least if you do it may create a risk of exploding bottles..? Admittedly, I didn’t explore too deeply after I decided to keg.
I built a “Craigslist special” picnic tap keezer setup for ~$300 complete (w/4 ball lock kegs). Shortly after was “phase 2” of the build & I added a collar with 3 Intertap stainless flow control taps(Long story short, had a few picnic tap spills and a small keezer flood after a party)
The only thing in hindsight, I would NOT have spent the extra $’s for flow control on cider. When I add my fourth tap that won’t have flow control & will be my dedicated cider tap.
Cheers [emoji482]

 

[MarkKF]

Everything I brew--beer, wine, cider--I bottle. I don't go through it fast enough to warrant kegging.

Every cider I make goes in a keg. Most go in the bottle eventually. Some even before they carb.! But only a small amount gets served out of the keg. And some goes in a growler.

 

[mj1angier]

Like with my beers, I do both.

I adjust recipes to finish with 6 gallons. 5 get kegged and balance gets bottled. I put the bottled on the shelf and see how they age.

 

[Sailingeric]

I have done a few ciders and kegged most of them. I like I can adjust the CO2 up or down if needed and to avoid having to back sweeten, try using WLP002 English Ale yeast. I think it leaves enough sweetness in cider.

 

[Silver79]

I only keg for the simple reason that it's easier and less time consuming. Especially since my friends and family like it sweet as I do. When I travel I pour off a growler. I also used sanke style kegs because I found them cheap and already had some sanke style kegorator parts left over from my macro- brew days.
Bottles are great to drink out of, but since we host a few large parties every year, kegs have been a much better choice for me.

 

[bmd2k1]

I only keg for the simple reason that it's easier and less time consuming. Especially since my friends and family like it sweet as I do. When I travel I pour off a growler. I also used sanke style kegs because I found them cheap and already had some sanke style kegorator parts left over from my macro- brew days.
Bottles are great to drink out of, but since we host a few large parties every year, kegs have been a much better choice for me.

Any tips/tricks to successful kegging? ie) how important is it to start with full keg, recommended PSI, etc. Thx & Cheers!

 

[Silver79]

We'll, I'll tell you this. The way I work my cider is not the way others would recommend, but it works for me. I've put my cider into half bbl's, quarter bbl's, and sixth bbl's. I rack into what I have free, fill with co2, puge 3 times at 30 psi. Leave it there for 36 hours, sometimes shaking it every 12 hrs. Then I lower the regulator to 4-ish psi @ and pull the purge one last time. I serve cold out of fridge at 4 psi with decent head and fairly short 4-6' lines. Others do not replicate this experience and will explain that these are not best practices. I'll admit, there are other ways to keg cider, but this has worked for me for about 3 years and going on 100 gallons of kegged cider. We drink it fairly quickly and serve it by the pitcher at parties. Enjoy your cider making and find a way that works best for you and your drinking friends.

 

[JimRausch]

6 years in and I still bottle everything. I'm weird I know, I actually enjoy the bottling process. And ddibbern5- I backsweeten with a can of fajc at bottling time, do one in a soda bottle and cooler pasteurize the batch when the soda bottle is turgid. It works.

 

[chevalcider]

I'm picking up my keg purchase tomorrow. I plan on converting to legging as I am tired of bottling. Life's busy and I'd rather not have a day spent bottling keep me from brewing more cider!

 

[bmd2k1]

...still prepping my kegging knowledge & strategy....

When kegging is it generally a good practice to fill it as close to full capacity as possible?

So if I had corny kegs...5gals is standard......what if I only had a 3gal batch....would that much starting head space cause any drastic issues?

Cheers!

 

[Maylar]

You need to leave some head space, but not much. That's figured into the nominal size of a keg, so a 5 gallon keg will optimally hold 5 gallons.

Part of setting up a batch in the keg is purging the air out and replacing it with CO2. The more air, the more CO2 gets consumed during purge. So having less than a full keg is certainly possible, at the expense of some wasted gas during the initial purge.

 

[ten80]

I tend to fill kegs as full as possible, however I've not noticed any oxidation issues when only filling kegs 1/2-2/3 full. In these cases, I pressurize the kegs to about 40 PSI to quickly drive CO2 into the cider, then vent multiple times during the next few days to try to remove excess oxygen from the headspace. I'll also add 1 or 2 crushed campden tablets to remove free oxygen from the cider and help reduce oxidation.

You can never vent all the O2 from a keg headspace because each time you pressurize/vent you will remove at best only 50% of the oxygen. I've read of tests where purging headspace 4-5 times did not fully remove oxygen; it is a futile endeavor.

 

[chevalcider]

Recently I reviewed a YouTube series I watched about 3-4 years ago and noticed something I had forgotten since the last time I watched. The guy in the video filled his keg with water and then used CO2 to push the water out through the liquid line. He then racked his cider into the keg through one of the ball locks, burping the release valve to allow cider to flow in.

 

[gregbathurst]

I use bottles because I use my own apples and get a big harvest sometimes, more than 500L. It will store indefinitely in bottles but is too much for kegs. kegs are good for chilling and backsweetening, you can drink a whole keg before the sugar ferments away.

 

[Maylar]

You can never vent all the O2 from a keg headspace because each time you pressurize/vent you will remove at best only 50% of the oxygen. I've read of tests where purging headspace 4-5 times did not fully remove oxygen; it is a futile endeavor.

There are charts for that - number of purges vs pressure. I'm sure I've seen them in the beer kegging forum here. 10 purges at 30 psi gets you to like .01% oxygen (IIRC).

 

[ten80]

There are charts for that - number of purges vs pressure. I'm sure I've seen them in the beer kegging forum here. 10 purges at 30 psi gets you to like .01% oxygen (IIRC).

OK, sure, you can get close (but never actually zero) to purging out all the O2 with enough purges, but at a certain point it becomes a huge waste of CO2 and time.

Assuming constant temperature, you will use 30X more volume of CO2 to purge a 1/2 keg with 30 psi ten times versus pushing out a full keg of starsan at 3 psi. That's a huge difference. (pV=nRT; simplified to n=pV)
.
It would be more effective to just use CO2 to push starsan out of a keg as chevalcider showed in the video above, then fill with cider and know that your keg is 100% purged.

 

[Maylar]

OK, sure, you can get close (but never actually zero) to purging out all the O2 with enough purges, but at a certain point it becomes a huge waste of CO2 and time.

Assuming constant temperature, you will use 30X more volume of CO2 to purge a 1/2 keg with 30 psi ten times versus pushing out a full keg of starsan at 3 psi. That's a huge difference. (pV=nRT; simplified to n=pV)
.
It would be more effective to just use CO2 to push starsan out of a keg as chevalcider showed in the video above, then fill with cider and know that your keg is 100% purged.

It is indeed a waste of CO2, and with diminishing returns. And as I mentioned, it's even worse if your keg isn't full. I do 8 purges at 25 psi and never had an oxidation problem.

 

[MarkKF]

OK, sure, you can get close (but never actually zero) to purging out all the O2 with enough purges, but at a certain point it becomes a huge waste of CO2 and time.

Assuming constant temperature, you will use 30X more volume of CO2 to purge a 1/2 keg with 30 psi ten times versus pushing out a full keg of starsan at 3 psi. That's a huge difference. (pV=nRT; simplified to n=pV)
.
It would be more effective to just use CO2 to push starsan out of a keg as chevalcider showed in the video above, then fill with cider and know that your keg is 100% purged.

I think I disagree. When you fill and purge. You don’t loose 100% of the volume. Just the volume needed to create the pressure. (Much smaller in a full keg). When you use CO2 to push out starsan then push the CO2 out with cider you loose 200% of the volume.

 

[ten80]

Well, I'm not about to work out the math in this tiny text box, but I did take into account the volume of a 1/2 full keg vs a the full volume of a keg emptied of starsan. Work it out for yourself for either scenario using the simplified equation n=pV. You can negate the constant "R" and temperature "T" because they are the same in either case. "n" is just simplified to a constant for the "amount" of gas present. Have fun

Regardless of keg purging I think that cider is not as susceptible to oxidation as beer (fewer staling compounds are present) and I've even had 2 year old cider out of a fermenter with a dry airlock that was oxidized, but not undrinkable.